In a pure democracy, voters make all the decisions. In a republic, we elect representatives to make decisions, and if we don’t like their work, we replace them at the next election.
I try to be an informed citizen, but I don’t have the time or the expertise to determine whether a bridge on a county road should be repaired or replaced, this year or next. We elect county commissioners to make those decisions. It’s their job to look at the budget and the engineering reports and traffic counts and come to a conclusion about how to manage public assets.
It’s our job to determine whether they’re worth keeping.
You can extend this on up the political ladder. I’d have trouble figuring out how to cut taxes while increasing prison capacity on account of stiffer sentencing laws, so we elect people to the Colorado General Assembly, and let them come up with an answer. Nor would I know how to reduce the terrorist threat against the United States by invading a country that was not connected with a terrorist threat, but we elect people who presumably know how this can be done.
Obviously, they don’t always have an answer. But the injection of more democracy into Colorado politics may not provide all the answers, either, and yet that seems to be the premise behind Amendment 38 on this year’s ballot.
Essentially, it substitutes “government by petition” for “government by elected officials.”
It covers “the state and all local governments, and includes all enterprises, authorities, and other governmental entities” like counties, cities, towns, special districts, etc., and it ensures “petition rights” to enact and repeal laws and actions at November elections.
No real problem there, but the “petition rights” are far too broad. “Any adult in Colorado may circulate any petition,” so a developer who didn’t like a Salida City Council decision could import any number of petition circulators – presumably including illegal immigrants over 18 years old, since they would be adults in Colorado, and that’s all it takes.
To get their measure on the ballot, the petitioners would need signatures amounting to at least 5 percent of the number of votes, cast in that political jurisdiction, in the most recent full-term election for Colorado secretary of state.
That shouldn’t be too hard, since this is a sloppy petition process. “Errors in petition forms or ballot titles shall not affect petitions,” and “technical defects, minor variations, and minor omissions shall be very broadly construed to aid petitions.”
The petitioners have up to 12 months to circulate the petitions before the election. If the measure is approved, then in general it cannot be changed by the governing board, but only by another public election.
All this might be fine if there were a robust public discussion of the given issue. But the Amendment 38 people took some steps to prevent that.
For one thing, the official voter information material works like this: The proponents can provide up to 1,000 words, and the opponents are limited, not to 1,000 words, but to the number of words the proponents used.
For another, once the petition forms start circulating, which can last up to a year, “no district or district staff shall … discuss pending petitions,” and a violator gets a $3,000 fine, which has to come out of his own pocket after he pays for his own lawyer because “No district resources or staff time shall aid accused violators or repay expenses.”
It has no stated exception for people discussing public issues on their own time, or even in the privacy of their own homes. It might even forbid elected officials from discussing public issues at public meetings.
Granted, I’ve never known a school board member who couldn’t wax eloquent about the need for a mill-levy increase. But I’d like to know what they have to say about where the money will go before I decide how to vote – and Amendment 38 says they can’t tell me.
So even if Amendment 38 seems democratic because we’d get to vote directly on more matters, it doesn’t seem all that democratic when it forbids so many people from discussing public issues.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
